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A tale of two
university presidentsHE wants to improve undergraduate education by stiffening grading, transforming tenure reviews, encouraging foreign study and persuading professors to spend more time with students.
He wants to leverage the university's prowess in life sciences to help create a second Silicon Valley near the university built around biotech. He wants to expand the main campus to accommodate the university's growth and he wants to reassert the university's role and increase its presence outside its walls.
His resume includes a stint working with a Democratic presidential administration in Washington.
Is this Evan Dobelle, president of the University of Hawaii? No, this to-do list belongs to Larry Summers, president of Harvard University, profiled in this week's edition of Business Week.
MANY challenges are the same in Cambridge, Mass., and Manoa, but a vast gap separates the two institutions. A recent ranking placed UH in the third tier of 249 national universities, among those who ranked 131st to 187th. Harvard was listed second, just behind Princeton but ahead of Yale, Cal Tech, M.I.T. and Stanford.
To attain that ranking, Harvard's reputation earned a rating of 4.9 out of a possible 5, compared to UH's 2.6. It retained 96 percent of its freshman class, compared to 80 percent at UH. It graduated 97 percent of its class of 2000, while UH graduated 54 percent.
A university is only as strong as its student body. At Harvard, 90 percent of incoming freshmen came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes, compared to only 30 percent at UH.
During the last four decades, average SAT scores of Harvard freshmen have risen from under 1,400 to close to 1,500 out of a possible 1,600. This abundance of intelligence has inflated grades. Last year, when 90 percent of seniors graduated with honors, half were As.
Not all Harvard's riches are academic. Sixty-six percent of its alumni contribute to the school compared to only 9 percent of UH alums. Moreover, the nation's oldest university, founded in 1636, ranks first in endowment with $18.3 billion, dwarfing the $10.7 billion of second-place Yale.
To accomplish his plans, Summers says he will "use our resources as aggressively as possible." He's "prepared to cut things where appropriate and to spend more aggressively from the endowment." By comparison, Dobelle will need to raise new money, from alumni, corporations, foundations, investors and government.
WHILE Dobelle is pushing for a review and upgrading of academic programs and standards to make a UH degree more valuable, Summers is doing the same, fine-tuning courses to address the explosion of knowledge and the growing importance of science.
Summers told Business Week that today, Harvard has a "culture where it is unacceptable not to be able to name five plays by Shakespeare but where it is fine to not know the difference between a gene and a chromosome." He aims to change that.
Both universities are eyeing expansion -- UH into new campuses in Kapolei, Kona and Kakaako, Harvard into 100 acres in Allston, a neighborhood on the opposite bank of the Charles River. The prestigious Harvard Law School is a candidate to relocate to Allston, but many of its faculty, "who perceive the new site as an academic Siberia," oppose the project.
Dobelle wants to acquire more land in Manoa, or even possibly south of the H-1 freeway, to build new dormitories and create a college-town atmosphere. If successful, he'll face many of the same issues and tensions.
Both presidents see developing biotechnology research as a historic opportunity to springboard new industries and create a second Silicon Valley. Harvard and nearby M.I.T. have already attracted biotech companies, such as Biogen, Millennium and Vertex, while Hawaii's starting almost from scratch.
They also have grand ambitions beyond their universities. Summers wants to reclaim Harvard's role in setting national policy in areas such as education reform. Dobelle's goals include developing "a plan on international education and the university's role in international affairs and increase UH's international presence."
For Harvard to move from No. 2 back to the top spot among U.S. universities will take strong and determined leadership, but Dobelle calls being UH president "the hardest job in higher education."
Given the disparity in resources, he could be right.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.